That Voice: In Search of Ann Drummond-Grant, the Singer Who Shaped My Life

By Marcia Menter

As an adolescent in Syracuse, New York, Marcia Menter fell in love with the recorded voice of Ann Drummond-Grant, a Scottish contralto who sang with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the legendary Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. She dreamed of singing with the company, even though it didn’t hire Americans—and even though, as she soon found out, Ann Drummond-Grant had died years earlier. But her dream persisted, and for the young music lover, Drummie’s glorious voice remained a living presence—a refuge from the race riots and political upheavals of her school years.

Menter earned a conservatory degree in singing before finally realizing she was not a performer at heart. She spent decades searching for Ann Drummond-Grant—visiting places she lived and interviewing people who knew her—and putting together the puzzle of her life. This is the story of a singer and her listener—of two separate lives divided by time and geography but connected in unexpected ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781647426637

Marcia Menter

Marcia Menter grew up in Syracuse, New York, and earned a degree in vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music. She has held senior writing and editing positions at national magazines including Glamour, Mademoiselle, Self, Redbook, and More magazine. Her self-help book, The Office Sutras: Exercises for Your Soul at Work, was published in 2003 by Red Wheel/Weiser Press. Her poetry chapbook, The Longing Machine, was published in 2007 by HappenStance Press in Scotland. She has published poems, essays, and literary criticism in journals in the US and UK. Menter lives in Manhattan.

Book preview

1

MOVING IMAGE

I’M WATCHING A GRAINY KINESCOPE on YouTube, hardly believing I’ve managed to track it down. The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, in New York on its 1955 American tour, is performing a short version of The Pirates of Penzance, live, on the highbrow TV show Omnibus. The ladies of the chorus crowd a painted set under lighting that does not flatter their heavy stage makeup. They go through their little dance steps impeccably, hoop skirts bouncing, as they have hundreds of times before, marking the words of the songs with hand gestures and facial expressions ordained by W.S. Gilbert seventy-six years earlier.

The D’Oyly Carte Company of 1955 is the official Gilbert and Sullivan troupe, holder of the copyrights, keeper of the flame. I’m sure the performers have had precious little time to memorize the cuts needed to compress a two-hour comic opera into forty minutes, but nobody makes a mistake. The pickup orchestra has its scruffy moments, but the conductor, Isidore Godfrey, brings the music to life, as always. The cast is comfortable enough to mug when mugging is called for, and I mug right along with them, mouthing the words.

I’d known this footage existed for years and had a vague idea it could be viewed at the Museum of Television and Radio, but I never took myself there—that would have meant exposing a private desire. Eventually the internet, that vast public repository of private desires, led me to the firm that bought the old Omnibus shows. I tried to license this segment so I could watch it, but—bless them—they posted it online for free. Now its true audience, wonky and geriatric, has begun showing up, one at a time, to see a rare video record of the performers we’ve listened and listened to.

The cast shares three principals with the recording I grew up with. Most significantly, it has the same formidable contralto—the battleaxe as indispensable to Gilbert and Sullivan as Margaret Dumont was to the Marx Brothers. Ruth, the Pirate Maid of all Work, is played by Ann Drummond-Grant. She died before I knew she existed, but she shaped the course of my life. I am watching Ann Drummond-Grant.

She’s fifty, about to turn fifty-one. She moves into the frame in left profile, an angle I’ve never seen in photographs, and not a flattering one. The enormous Jolly Roger hat surmounting a heavy wig of dark curls throws her features out of proportion: her nose looks oddly snub, her heavily shadowed eyes small under large painted brows. And her neck is beginning to sag. She points a dainty pistol at the tenor. It’s the beginning of the famous Paradox Trio, in which Ruth and the Pirate King tell Frederic that because he was born on February 29, he’s had only five birthdays, so he’s technically five years old, not twenty-one, and must therefore remain apprenticed to the pirates. . . .

If I have to explain these plots, it will not go well for me.

She looks intent, intent, intent. Like every Ruth before her, she laughs six hearty laughs on the eighth notes of the intro, then sits down on a conveniently placed rock to begin the trio’s first verse. Her voice is exactly the same as on my 1957 recording; she was known for being absolutely consistent from performance to performance, in sickness and health. As called for, she puts her hands on her hips, locking her thumbs in the wide belt of her Pirate Maid outfit (aproned hoop skirt, officer’s naval jacket). She uses an actual gesture to hand off the next verse to the Pirate King, as though the audience won’t be able to figure out that he’s singing next. There is no line in a D’Oyly Carte performance that isn’t telegraphed in some way. But her smile is lovely. Lovely. Seen full face, she is a regally beautiful woman.

There’s not enough of her in this broadcast. It leaves out the song where Ruth explains how Frederic came to be a pirate (she, his slightly deaf nursemaid, was charged with apprenticing him to a pilot), as well as the Act I duet it took me decades to recognize as a brilliant parody of Verdi. But it’s more of her than I had before, another piece of a puzzle that can never be completed. For more than fifty years since I first heard her voice, she’s been lodged in my psyche, a benign presence, a lifelong friend. This has never changed because I’ve never spoken about her. But I need to speak about her now.

It’s because of Ann Drummond-Grant that I committed myself to music school and the study of singing, even though I didn’t have a fabulous voice or, more important, a bone-deep desire to perform. It’s because of her that I came to understand the meaning of a private self and a private inner life, a center no one else had to be granted access to, a non-physical room of my own. She had that same understanding. Even on camera, a woman of enormous presence and discipline telling an audience all she knows, there is a certain privacy about her. And her voice, on vinyl, has the gravity of a whole soul.

Not that I listen to her on vinyl these days, though those first LPs, and the extra copies I bought to make sure I would never be without her, are on a high shelf in my apartment, having followed me through a dozen moves. I have her digitally now, on CD, in the cloud, on every one of my devices. Vinyl—analog—is best because at some point she sang into a microphone, and the force of her voice created grooves on a physical surface. I listened to those records so many times that the grooves were burned into my brain. I know that if a surgeon touched the right place with a probe, her voice would ring out in the operating room. All I have to do to hear her is close my eyes. Not even that.

At this writing I’ve lived a dozen years longer than she did; she was not quite fifty-five when she died. It’s startling to be older than she ever was, to see the latter part of my life plain as day in the mirror. If I’m going to tell this tale, it’s time to begin.

2

LISTENING

I GREW UP IN SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, where it snows at least 120 inches a year—two inches one day, six the next—beginning around Halloween and ending sometime in April. When I walked to school, snowflakes gathered in the cuffs of my boots and ice crystals formed where my scarf covered my mouth; under my mittens, my hands were chapped. Puddles of water gathered by the radiator in the front hall where coats were draped to dry. Each day’s snow got plowed into large dirty curbside drifts, the streets got salted, and traffic kept right on moving—no small matter in a landscape filled with the rounded glacial hills called drumlins. Southern Scotland, where Ann Drummond-Grant grew up, is likewise a land of drumlins, though there’s much less snow.

I lived in the one big old house on a hilly street where little split-levels popped up like mushrooms in the 1950s. There had once been large, graceful elms, but they died of Dutch Elm disease and were cut down, leaving the street oddly bare.

My father was a physician in general practice. After office hours, he drove around in the rain and snow, making house calls. He had large deep feelings that were largely inaccessible, but I knew he loved me. My love for him was shot through with the fear of losing him. It was my father who introduced me to Gilbert and Sullivan. He loved music; we had a framed photo of him playing the violin as a boy, documenting the pride his Jewish immigrant parents took in being able to pay for lessons. When he went to medical school, he put the violin away.

My mother should have worked. She was smart and decisive, a born executive. But she spent her days doing what doctors’ wives did back then: having lunch, playing canasta, making reckless stabs at whatever crafts her friends were taking up. No one in her family went to college, in which respect they were like no other Jews I knew. She wasn’t long out of high school when she met my father, who was interning in her hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

Mother loved me—at the end of her life, she even said so—but not in any way I could discern. She spoke to me angrily, without patience or tenderness. I took it in stride, not knowing how else to take it. She rarely held or cuddled me; my earliest memory was of the disgust on her face as she changed my diaper. I remember exactly one time I was allowed to snuggle on her lap; I felt anxious because I was sucking my thumb and drooling on her apron. I wanted so much to love her the way I was supposed to, but never did manage it.

Mother was the oldest of eight and grew up without a speck of space to herself, which, I suppose, accounts for her possessiveness of the home turf. She tolerated no kind of messiness. My childhood friends have memories of eating cookies over the wastebasket so as not to scatter a single crumb.

She had an ear for music, though she couldn’t read it. She listened to the opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons and sang in a confident cabaret voice as she washed the dishes—pop standards from the thirties, mostly, and never a whole song. A verse, or a snatch of a verse. Missed the Saturday dance . . . Heard they crowded the floor . . . Couldn’t bear it without you. . . .

She sang to herself. Singing, for her, was a private affair. Once when she was listening to Leontyne Price on the radio, I told her, I can sing like that! She said, Okay, let’s hear it. I sang a high note in my best seven-year-old voice. She made a face and motioned me away. How could she not have heard how good I was?

I was a late child, a surprise. I had two brothers: Julian, eleven years older than me, and Robert, seven years older. Both were obsessive listeners. From the time I was tiny, I shadowed them and heard what they heard. Julian loved classical music, had perfect pitch and took piano lessons, forging his way through Chopin nocturnes on our blurry sounding upright. He never played a record just once. I remember working on a jigsaw puzzle while he listened, over and over, to Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. I thought it was awful, clangy and dissonant, but after a couple of hours, I liked it.

Robert played guitar and piano by ear and liked anything good. Once I stood outside his door while he listened to It Might as Well Rain until September a dozen times, fascinated by Carole King’s unbeautiful, electronically doubled voice. Then he switched over to Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, another unbeautiful voice I couldn’t not listen to. The world had room for every kind of singer.

When I was older, I began listening to Broadway musicals on my own: Carousel, Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl. I seem to remember singing and dancing along with the records, but that can’t be right. The stereo was downstairs in a public part of the house, and I wouldn’t have sung out loud if anyone else was home. The one place I performed happily was at summer camp, hours away in the Adirondacks. I won a part in the camp show by belting out Matchmaker, Matchmaker from Fiddler and sang like a star in performance. At school, though, I more than once auditioned successfully for a part, only to be replaced when I couldn’t make myself heard. Shyness seized me by the throat, and my voice vanished.

But I knew I could sing. It was one of the few things I knew for sure. I didn’t know how to dress—my bunkmates at camp once did a fashion intervention to stop me from wearing plaids with florals. I didn’t know how to interact in groups without being on, believing that aggressive cleverness would make people like me. This usually backfired; most of the snarky things I said were taken the wrong way or not understood at all. I persisted. I had no other language for reaching out to people and usually missed the signals when people reached out to me. My sense of aloneness—of not being able to get through—generated an anxiety so familiar I ceased to be aware of it. But it was visible to all, in the crooks of my elbows and the backs of my knees, as eczema. I scratched my left ankle raw till I was a teenager, when finally, mercifully, I was given a tube of cortisone ointment.

3

CHUBBETTE

I WAS A PUDGY CHILD, the sort of pudge that people find adorable in babies but unacceptable when the babies grow up. I had squishy thighs and upper arms and a little pot belly; my uncle who loved to pinch baby fat found plenty to pinch on me. It would never have occurred to me that this was hereditary, but what I had was a Russian Jewish Babushka Body in training: I was built like my grandmothers, who weren’t thin. It shouldn’t have mattered. I was perfectly healthy. But I grew up believing that I was fat, that it was my fault, and that fat was not lovable.

I craved savory things, not sweets. I have a memory of crawling, still in diapers, to a kitchen cupboard, opening it, and swigging soy sauce from the bottle in utter bliss. But I acquired the classic American carb addiction soon enough, and while I was never obese, I was bigger than I was supposed to be. From the age of six, I was always being entreated to diet, always sneaking food, always trying to look in the mirror and see someone thin. Mother dressed me in Chubbettes, a line of dresses for little girls on the plump side. (Tagline: She can have a tummy . . . and still look yummy!) Whenever I saw that label, I felt humiliated.

I might have felt better about my body if I’d learned to enjoy moving it. Some of my classmates took ballet lessons and had little tutus, but I was made to understand that such things were not for me. Gym class was full of activities I was bad at. In any game of dodgeball, I was the first to be hit. I couldn’t shinny up a rope or vault over a pommel horse. We weren’t taught how to do those things; we just took a run at the equipment, one of us after another, and either managed it or didn’t. I tried and failed for years to pull myself up onto the gymnastic rings, finally succeeding in sixth grade and yelling, Jesus Christ! to the consternation of my Catholic gym teacher. I hadn’t realized such skills could be worked on and acquired. Nor did I understand, at age twelve, that hormones were beginning to kick in.

Puberty made everything worse in ways I had no language for. I was supposed to want breasts, but the minute they sprouted, I was supposed to keep them in check. I had a bathing suit with foam cups that were nowhere near filled; at summer camp, I stowed interesting rocks in them. One day I noticed in Mother’s bedroom mirror that my waist curved in, and my hips curved out—an hourglass shape, which was supposed to be good. (I had no idea what an actual hourglass figure looked like, or that it was created by corsets.) I didn’t realize it meant I was destined to be hippy, busty, and short-waisted, that I would never, ever look good in the clothes the slim, willowy girls wore. I had no real sense of my body at all, a state that persisted for decades.

Some of my classmates started menstruating in sixth grade. They seemed to sweat and suffer with it. In seventh grade, at thirteen, it was my turn. I excused myself from math class with pains radiating from somewhere under the pot belly; in the girls’ bathroom, I saw dark ugly blood. I knew what it was, but it horrified me. On the way back to class, a bulky sanitary napkin stuffed in my underpants, I asked myself in a not-nice way, "How does it feel to be sexually mature?" I’d never had a sexual feeling that I knew of.

For reasons unknown to me, I wanted to tell Mother about getting my period before I told anyone else. It seemed fitting, though she and I had never discussed periods. So I endured a planned visit to a friend’s house—the pain was intense, I was dizzy with it—before walking home. I found Mother in bed with the shades drawn. She was having a migraine, her first in many years, and in fact the only one I remember her having. She took my news with a grunt of chagrin: she didn’t need this. She managed to fish a sanitary belt from her lingerie drawer and tell me where the pads were before returning to bed. If I’d thought I would be able to bond with her over this, I was wrong.

Some weeks later, she presented me with a book called Time to Grow Up: An Affectionate Guide for Young Ladies from Ten to Sixteen by an ex-pinup girl called Candy Jones. Ms. Jones was indeed affectionate, but I was not one of the young ladies she had in mind. Her basic assumptions were that every girl wants to get married and raise a family, which I didn’t, and that jobs were something to pass the time before the right marrying man shows up, which I thought would never happen to me. (Jones herself married twice, worked all her life, and claimed, plausibly, to have been hypnotized and used as a spy by the CIA.)

Time to Grow Up had been published in 1962, and by the time I encountered it in 1966, it was hilariously out of date. While Betty Friedan was writing The Feminine Mystique, Candy Jones was hoping that a woman would never become president of the United States: Confidentially and just between the two of us, do you think one of us actually could run this country without getting everything bollixed up and forgetting to turn off the gas at the White House when we went on vacation? I didn’t know enough to feel insulted by this.

I did know girls who might have appreciated Jones’s thirteen-point checklist for determining whether your clothes fit properly, who might have nodded and smiled when informed that a strapless white formal can be accented with an emerald-green satin clutch. These were the same slender girls who knew how to talk to boys and liked the idea of dating them, and who gave parties where people made out. I couldn’t imagine this. Didn’t want to.

The sole sentence from Time to Grow Up that stayed with me was this: Some girls awaken to the fact that their stomach looks like a football in a fitted princess line dress. That was a figure flaw—any extra flesh was a figure flaw—fixable by sit-ups, leg lifts, and a panty girdle. I never did fix it. Even now, when Pilates has given me a rock-solid core, I still have a football stomach. Candy Jones lied to me.

This, then, was the adolescent girl who heard Ann Drummond-Grant’s voice for the first time: shy on the inside, stocky and snarky on the outside. An introvert in extrovert’s clothing—at odds with her body and so lonely she didn’t even know it. Not the first or last girl of this description, surely.

4

KATISHA

ON A COLD, DARK NIGHT toward the end of 1966, my father brought home a recording of The Mikado and handed it to me, saying he thought I’d like it, that it was fun. Looking at the photo on the cover—the full cast standing onstage in out-of-register color, their makeup a garish yellow—I was unimpressed. The albums I liked were slicker. The Beatles’ Revolver had come out that year, and I’d stared at the black-and-white Klaus Voormann collage on the cover while Robert played the songs twice. But The Mikado was a present from my adored father, so I took it seriously.

I knew almost nothing about Gilbert and Sullivan except that they were old and English. That suited me. I’d read the Sherlock Holmes stories and mostly forgotten them, but retained a fondness for the Victorian way of saying things, in long, convoluted sentences packed with words whose meanings I might deduce if I was too lazy to look them up.

The Mikado dates from Sherlock Holmes’s day, 1885. It’s set in Japan, but Gilbert’s Japan is England with an exotic veneer, an excuse to put his players in gorgeous costumes and have them gesture extravagantly with fans. For many years, audiences saw nothing wrong with Caucasian actors wearing yellow makeup to signify Japanese-ness. Now it’s cringeworthy, and the opera has become problematic. That’s a pity, because aside from its casual Victorian racism, The Mikado is a work of genius. I loved it from the start.

Sullivan’s music was glorious, every bar of it. Gilbert’s lyrics required my keen attention. (Fortunately, there was a printed libretto.) His rhymes were intricate and endlessly inventive, involving strange